Zend Technologies, the creator of the open source PHP programming language and runtime environment that was last year ported to the i5/OS and OS/400 platform, and COMMON, the largest user group for i5/OS and OS/400 professionals, have teamed up to create an advisory group to help steer the development of Zend's technologies on the System i platform.

Just before the July 4th holiday, Jim Dillard, the IBM alliance manager at Zend, and Ron Newman, who is chairman of COMMON's Advocacy Team and president of technology consulting firm Newmark Technologies, sent out a joint appeal via email for people to join the Zend Advisory Group. The idea behind the group is to get together a bunch of COMMON members and have them provide direct input to Zend so the unique capabilities of the System i platform can be addressed more fully by Zend's products and to help Zend better understand how to interface with and deliver products to midrange customers.

There are some criteria to join the Zend Advisory Group. If you answer yes to these questions, then you might have what it takes:

Are you currently a programmer using the System i?

Have you installed Zend Core for i5/OS?

Do you have a PHP application running now?

Do understand the process of creating a call to the DB2 database?

Can you invoke RPG commands via the PHP toolkit?

Newman and Dillard do not expect everyone in the advisory group to answer yes to all of these questions, by the way. If you want to sign up, send an email to Ron_Newman@common.org and you can get an application.